MICHAEL MILI Vs. IFCILIMITED

JUDGEMENT

(1.) C.M. No. 16860/2013 (exemption).

(2.) BY this writ petition, the petitioner who is an employee of the respondent -company seeks the relief of setting aside of the orders passed by the respondent dated 1.8.2013, 13.9.2013 and 25.9.2013 whereby pay scale and allowances of the petitioner have been revised downwards. The facts of the case are that the petitioner became an employee of the respondent -company (as Senior Associate Vice President) when the respondent -company was a private company. Appointment with the respondent -company in its private avtar was therefore a contractual employment. For this contractual appointment, there was no specific period. Once there is no specific period, the appointment is only month to month. The respondent -company thereafter became a government -company (i.e. instrumentality of State and reference to this government company in this judgment is therefore reference to such instrumentality of State) as the government took financial and managerial control of the respondent -company.

(3.) THE fact of the matter is that the respondent -company being a financial institution decided to adopt the salary structure as given by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Once the petitioner accepts his status as an employee of the government company, and not a contractual status, the government company is entitled to fix its own pay scales. It is only if the action of the government company is arbitrary and violative of the Constitutional right enshrined in Article 14 of the Constitution, would such an action of the respondent be liable to be challenged in a Court of law. On the aspect of arbitrariness, counsel for the petitioner has referred to grounds 4(i) and 4(iv) of the writ petition which read as under: -